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You don’t really know how.
All Liverpool’s players can do is try to work through it, that sudden wave of grief from the loss of a joyful friend, who was far more than just a team-mate.
The great difference is that might come in front of crowds of thousands, in view of audiences of millions, amid the sporting expectation to perform as Champions.
It is the affecting discordance of discussing a real-life tragedy, where people are grieving, within the context of sport’s relative trivialities.
We have no idea how this will manifest.
That fosters an understandable inclination to not talk about Jota’s passing at all beyond the commemoration, to try and only discuss the football.
That feeling will be all the more pronounced since there’s no comparable example in modern English football, nothing to reach to.
The game has had players pass at the prime of their career, and some of the most prominent are worth commemorating now: Jimmy Davis, Marc-Vivien Foe, Antonio Puerta, Dani Jarque, Besian Idrizaj, Davide Astori, George Baldock.
All grief is as pure as any other grief, but there’s an extra dimension in a football context when it involves reigning Champions — particularly after all the emotion of the long wait that Liverpool had.
Football is not clanky.”
The sport’s social and community values make its emotion natural in such moments.
There is nevertheless a difference between immediately coping with a tragedy and registering its deeper effects.
What will be said if Liverpool endure a bad run later in the season?
“We were Champions, I think, for him.”
While this obviously isn’t to say there should be any expectation that Liverpool play on the memory, Caulfield argues that “a football club might be the safest place” for such emotion.
The sport’s very calendar may even have an organic therapeutic effect.
Back in October, Liverpool made a 25-minute film for World Mental Health Day, and the forward volunteered to speak about the importance of airing your feelings.
“I still feel like when I enter the pitch everything clears,” Jota said.
That is his personal experience, and won’t be true for everyone.